Stephen said
It is very important to point this out that the so-called “Nones” by and large are NOT self-identified atheists. They’re simply part of a healthy growing trend to “believe what you want but mind your own business about it”. This trend is devoutly to be encouraged since we live in a culture besotted by Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists whose favorite activity is telling everybody else what they should think and how they should live and who expect the state and the culture to privilege their beliefs. It’s mightily encouraging especially to see the young folks leaving the organized church in droves.I tell my Christian friends not to be too worried about this. When it ceases becoming necessary to feign belief in order to prosper in our society all the barnacles and leeches and hangers-on who participate for advantage will drop away and the Church will consist of only sincere believers. Surely not a bad thing. As a secularist and a skeptic I am personally interested to see if Christianity can compete on a level playing field.
Indeed, that would probably lead to a great religious revival, since it’s the intolerant public spokespersons for fundamentalist religion that are driving people away.
Just as intolerant and obnoxious public atheists are driving people away from identifying with that movement, but since you say there’s no reward for being atheist in our society (tell that to Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and of course Carrier), hard to see what’s attracting people there, if not the right to feel superior to everyone else.
Atheism really has not much else to recommend it besides getting to make fun of people who believe differently. No good songs, no great art, no church socials–all the bad stuff and none of the good.
Believing as you please–now that’s a fine thing. That you can do far better without ‘isms’ of any kind.
godspell said
I don’t think that you’re drawing the line correctly. Yes, there are those who need certitude, simple answers to complex questions, and those who feel more comfortable in the gray areas, where the truth often lies.
[Fernando] The truth is usually not found, despite what you think, in the gray areas. The truth is in the correspondence with reality and that is not usually in the aforementioned gray areas, understood as an excessive emphasis on the equidistance between hypotheses, ideas, beliefs, assumptions, etc., or the post-modern, such as equality of all the “narratives and stories” and the “anything goes” à la FeyerabendBut many of the first type are atheists, and many of the other are theists, albeit of an unconventional bent.
[Fernando] What you say makes no sense. Surely it is that you have not yet understood how difficult and rigorous is atheism of a scientific and rational basis.
Atheism implies methodical doubt, inquiring skepticism, the search for truth, whether you like it or not, accommodate previous ideas of atheism or not.
Theism is based only on faith, which is by nature irrational. And faith does not allow any doubt. For once the path of doubt is opened, the believer finds himself on a sliding slope that ends in atheism.And really, there’s no need to put a label on yourself at all.
[Fernando] It can be. But I don’t use tags. I don’t need them or interest me. Whenever it comes to the case, I express my beliefs and opinions, although I don’t trust them and I always prefer to talk about my knowledge. Of them, there are some that I consider have a great chance of being true; of others, less.
And I would argue the ones who choose ‘unaffiliated’ when a pollster calls are saying precisely that. They are also refusing to affiliate with the religion – yes, religion – known as atheism.
[Fernando] Calling religion to atheism is of a puerility and a cosmic ignorance, sorry to tell you.
Atheism is based on hostility to faith. Also non-rational. There is exactly as much evidence to believe as to disbelieve–none. We have a universe, we don’t really know where it came from, nor can we explain how life came to be, even though we have a good idea how it develops. Many of the most rational and brilliant people in history have been devout, and many atheists can barely form coherent thoughts, and if you’ve spent much time discussing religion on the internet, you know that’s true. And many theists are immoral bastards. I try to be fair, and in any event, I don’t belong to either group. A Lapsed Catholic can not justly call himself theistic or atheistic. 😉
I suspect many avowed theists have little or no faith, btw. And many avowed atheists show great faith when put to the test. Because Jesus was right–it isn’t what you call yourself, what group you affiliate with, what beliefs you espouse or not, that matters.
Why did you put your own post in quotes?
godspell said
Atheism really has not much else to recommend it besides getting to make fun of people who believe differently. No good songs, no great art, no church socials–all the bad stuff and none of the good.
A simple question, my friend godspell: what have your atheist friends done to you so that you can be such an irrational and visceral hatred to atheists?
It makes me laugh that you say that atheists have nothing to offer: neither good songs, nor great art, no social gathering in a church … (of course, you say before that atheism is a religion; I suppose it will be a religion without gods, faith, congregations or churches).
What do you consider good songs? The awful horror of most so-called Christian modern evangelical music?
Look, I put a list of atheist composers:
Bela Bartok, Hector Berlioz, Pierre Boulez, Ferrucio Busoni, Frederik Delius, Leos Janacek, Leonard Bernstein, Peter Maxwell Davies, Dimitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, Edgard Varèse, Michael Tippett … Two well-known musicians, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were not exactly atheists, but very close. They defined themselfs as “spiritual” in the sense of “new age” esoterism and pantheists (they were something like some deists without much religious knowledge).
Just a few bars of any of them is worth more than 40 years of modern evangelical Christian music!
On fine arts – painting and sculpture -, the list of atheists is even longer: Pablo Picasso, Theo Van Gogh, Amadeo Modigliani, Auusto Rodin, Gustav Klimt, Edward Munch, Jackson Pollok, Mark Rothko, Kandinsky, Klee, Miró…
And in the cinematographic art? The difficult thing is in this case to find believers, i.e., theists. Now I remember Danish Carl Dreyer as a former believer, but his faith at the end of his life had almost completely disappeared and he called himself agnostic.
Um–for the record, do you consider African American evangelicals to be inferior church musicians? I think the people who make white evangelical music for megachurches would suck just as much or perhaps more as atheists.
And as for the others, as you say–‘not exactly atheists’ which is what we’re talking about. Basically all were raised as religious. Janacek used religious themes in his music all the time. Shostakovich, of course, had to deal with Stalinism, so no telling what his true convictions were.
It’s an impressive list, but all it proves is that even people who became atheists in adulthood (whether to distance themselves from the abuses of religion or because atheism was more the style) could still be religious in their own way, and express it through their music. They all began with that grounding (in many traditions), therefore, religion can claim all of them–one might argue that they needed religion to rebel against, but what you rebel against you are still connected to. Give me the child at seven years of age, and I will give you the man (or woman, and I note the list is entirely composed of white males, interesting).
Don’t do the “What did such and such ever do to you?” shtik, it’s lazy argumentation. And again, how could I possibly state my positions on the humanity of Jesus in any Christian church without being thought an atheist myself?
I just don’t think of myself that way. And because–well–(here’s a name you didn’t mention–and probably wouldn’t have, even if he was an atheist)
And mine would be that you’re a 12 year old who can’t come up with an original retort to save your life. 😀
I’m very glad to say nobody has ever run over any dog of mine, but you’d be surprised in how many different prominent persons have been so accused. He’s the only atheist, though. I have other interests, as I have mentioned before.
Do you?
Why can’t you just say “Richard Dawkins said something incredibly stupid and insensitive, and I’m embarrassed to have him act as my spokesperson. Most atheists I know feel the same way about it.”?
Only explanations that make any sense are that you agree with what he said (but are afraid to say so), or that you can’t bring yourself to criticize a fellow atheist, because that would somehow be showing weakness in the face of ‘the enemy’, even though you know damned well I’m not a practicing Christian.
Which is it?
I’m guessing you’ve had many critical things to say about many prominent religious persons, and no doubt some were justified.
How many of your dogs did those buggers kill?
In my own research it seems that there comes a time when this book becomes both hard to read and revered as perfect. We all know that the Pentatuech comes from four main sources, E, J, D, and P. Either P or perhaps another editor, B the bridger, brought these sources together into one. The Bridger seems to have attempted to smooth out the different sources so they made sense. We can see that he did not succeed at all.
From what I have read various authors, including Philo, begin to call the Torah “perfect” in the first century BC. The irony of Philo calling the Septuagint perfect is that he had no qualms rewriting it. In one work he completely reorders the plagues of Egypt. This is what I mean when I recall 2 Timothy 3:16 saying that all (writing) scripture was worthy of study. In Jesus recalling the Law, but then contradicting it, we see another luminary who respects what is written but then adds his own twist.
You also have to include the idea of Logos in all of this. There was the very Hellenistic idea that meaning and words and writing had a very mystical and important existence that could even be deified (if taken literally!!)
So you have the “perfect” Torah. You have allegorical writers. You have writers writing add ons or rewrites such as Enoch and Jasher (some of these writers still think the original is “perfect.”) You have Sacarri murdering Judeans unfaithful to their own interpretations and you have simple farmers or herders that know what to say or do to stay alive among these religious zealots.
I have no indication that would say that a 1st century Judean would have taken Genesis as literally as today’s fundamentalists do. Nor do I have an indication that they did not take it literally.
Focus/My View moves the thread back to topic-
I have no indication that would say that a 1st century Judean would have taken Genesis as literally as today’s fundamentalists do. Nor do I have an indication that they did not take it literally.
Part of the problem is that moderns tend to see the concepts of “literal” and “figurative” as distinct even opposing categories. The ancients didn’t really look at it quite that way. They had a concept of “literal” and a concept of “figurative” but they did not see them as contraries. Something could be true on multiple levels. The obvious example is Paul’s view of Adam in Romans. For Paul, Adam is both a literal human being and a type. Not either/or but both/and. Even folks like Origen and Augustine and Philo who tended to allegorize Genesis still thought that God created the world relatively recently in more or less the same state it is now.
It may be interesting for those who do not know the article:
Article by Rabbi Shubert Spero, entitled The Biblical Stories of Creation, Garden of Eden and the Flood: History or Metaphor? (Tradition Magazine 1999)
“Assuming that the Author knew precisely how the entire cosmos—the meta-galaxies, the galaxies, the Milky Way, the solar system, the planet Earth and all the different life-forms—all emerged out of the Big Bang and was able to describe it in correct mathematical and scientific terms, in what language was He to express this to people in a pre-scientific age? Obviously, He could not tell it all nor use terms that were not intelligible to them. On the other hand, what was written had to be of such a nature that later generations, coming after the advent of science, would not think themselves misled as they read the biblical account. The Torah intended the story of Creation to be taken literally but with one reservation: that it be understood that the terms had “stretchability,” i.e., that while all of the nouns would retain their common-sense meanings, in the event that future scientific discovery should broaden our knowledge of such phenomena as light, time, water, sun, stars, heavens, firmament (rakia), we should be prepared to “stretch” their primary meanings to cover and include these new phenomena, with the overall account remaining essentially “true.”
A fellow scientist of mine said, with some humor, about this comment by Rabbi Shubert Spero:
“On the other hand, what was written had to be of such a nature that later generations, coming after the advent of science, would not think themselves misled as they read the biblical account”,
that it was shocking that to the author or authors of Genesis God would not have given them the perfect solution to this problem: to write the necessary scientific footnotes and annexes for the readers of scientific modernity.
Well, this is–rabbinic. And I mean that in a good way. How do justify continuing to believe in the Torah as God’s Word, while still acknowledging that science has the final word on matters of fact, and any perceived incongruity is a confusion of terms. The literal interpretation is the ‘stupid son’ story. Science is for the smart son (who goes to Harvard).
Laugh all you like, but there did have to be ways for religion to give way to science without losing face. And anyway, Genesis does crudely evoke much of what we now believe about the origins of the cosmos and the development of life. I don’t think that’s because God dictated it to some ancient scribe. But it’s still damned interesting that it came out that way. Unlikely, of course, that Genesis was not at least partly derived from earlier sources, as is the case with basically all myths that came down to us in written form. And as with all myths, if you let the facts blind you to the truths, you’re making a literalist error of your own.
godspell said
Laugh all you like, but there did have to be ways for religion to give way to science without losing face.
There were many and very complex circumstances that led to the scientific revolution taking place in Europe and not in Islam, although between the nineteenth and twelfth centuries Arab-Islamic science was far superior to that of Europe (although it is a legend that Europe was in the “dark” in the late Middle Ages)
The history of Christianity and the birth of natural philosophy, which would become modern science, are very overlapping.
This process is long, but three facts are worth highlighting: 1st The Investiture Controversy (won by the Church), 2nd the metaphysics of Christianity, with a strong Hellenic influence – something that did not happen in either Judaism or Islam – and 3rd the great development of natural theology in Christianity (which reflects the existence of the two books in Christian Theology: the Book of Nature and the Book of Revelation; again, not in Judaism or Islam).
Until the mid-nineteenth century there were still bridges between Christianity and science. From then on, they quickly and radically separated to the point that today religion and science, faith and facts are incompatible.
Despite this epistemological and ontological incompatibility, it is accepted that there are believers who are good scientists. But for this, at the entrance of the lab, they must leave their religious beliefs on the coat rack as they leave their coat, their umbrella and their hat, and do science in the lab with methodological naturalism and rejecting the supernatural fallacies of “God in the gaps”.
godspell said
[…] And anyway, Genesis does crudely evoke much of what we now believe about the origins of the cosmos and the development of life.
Not to much. In fact, very, very little. To put it clearly and in all truth, despite having to contradict you, nothing at all.
If it’s a Just so story for little children, of the kind that Kipling wrote, then we can agree.
godspell said
[…] And anyway, Genesis does crudely evoke much of what we now believe about the origins of the cosmos and the development of life.
Not to much. In fact, very, very little. To put it clearly and in all truth, despite having to contradict you, nothing at all.
If it’s a Just so story for little children, of the kind that Kipling wrote, then we can agree.
Stephen said
Focus/My View moves the thread back to topic-I have no indication that would say that a 1st century Judean would have taken Genesis as literally as today’s fundamentalists do. Nor do I have an indication that they did not take it literally.
Part of the problem is that moderns tend to see the concepts of “literal” and “figurative” as distinct even opposing categories. The ancients didn’t really look at it quite that way. They had a concept of “literal” and a concept of “figurative” but they did not see them as contraries. Something could be true on multiple levels. The obvious example is Paul’s view of Adam in Romans. For Paul, Adam is both a literal human being and a type. Not either/or but both/and. Even folks like Origen and Augustine and Philo who tended to allegorize Genesis still thought that God created the world relatively recently in more or less the same state it is now.
Sorry I missed this before. Very nicely put. No story that survives ever works on one level alone. (One might argue no story does, but I’ve seen too much online fanfic to believe that.)
I would challenge you godspell, to come up with any creation scenario that I could not fit into the Genesis narrative as well as the current scientific consensus does.
1000 years before a Moses would have written Genesis, and 2000 years before it was probably last edited, humans built pyramids of such scale and such exactitude that they are difficult for moderns to understand how they did such a thing. Humans did not lack the capacity to understand the sun was the center of a solar system and the earth was the third planet from the sun. They merely lacked perspective.
So there is no reason for the sun to be impossibly created on the fourth day in Genesis if it is supposed to be the message of the Creator. The earth rotating and circling the sun is 2nd grade science.
There was no reason to tell it wrongly, except that the writer did not know.
Aaand back to topic again. One thing you may have noticed as you read the Sumerian, Assyrian, Ugarit or Babylonian texts that contain parallels to Genesis’s primeval history is that there are myriad sources. Genesis has bits and pieces of many stories. These stories existed side by side, despite having different creation accounts from each other. There are at least 5 different Babylonian myths with creation bits that are the proposed influence on Genesis dating to 600 BC.
Then we get to the idea of a Prime Mover. The First Cause of Greek philosophy. I would propose that the Greek influence is what prompted the idea of creating a history of the world instead of simply a mythology to explain creation for entertainment. The references to creation in Isaiah and Job differ from each other and markedly from Genesis, but they are only mentioned as examples of the power of The God, not to instruct on how creation happened. There are many competing attempts by Greek historians, sometimes quoting their ancestors and adding more to the explanations. None of these attempts of history were based on anything other than the local traditions combined together with a respect for the antiguity of the Near East.
What I think is important to understanding the need for a primeval history is the relationship between the Greeks and the Judean outside of the southern Levant. When Alexander conquered lands he instituted Greek styled cities ruled by Macedonians or Greeks. So in Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt there were cities mostly comprised of the natives and ruled by the Greeks. Judea was a province on the edge of two Greek ruled empires and as such many found their way into the capitals of Alexandria and Antioch. These Judeans felt compelled to be separate from the natives by their puritan rituals and beliefs. They were compelled to remain separate from the Greeks who wanted to maintain control. Especially in Alexandria, where Onias iv fled after the Maccabean massacres began, there was a sort of alliance between the Ptolemys and the Judeans, both of which despised the Syrian rulers.
It is in this environment, with Greeks and Judean writers reading each other’s works, that an attempt at creating a distinctly Judean version of creation would make sense to me.
Stephen said
It is very important to point this out that the so-called “Nones” by and large are NOT self-identified atheists. They’re simply part of a healthy growing trend to “believe what you want but mind your own business about it”. This trend is devoutly to be encouraged since we live in a culture besotted by Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists whose favorite activity is telling everybody else what they should think and how they should live and who expect the state and the culture to privilege their beliefs. It’s mightily encouraging especially to see the young folks leaving the organized church in droves.I tell my Christian friends not to be too worried about this. When it ceases becoming necessary to feign belief in order to prosper in our society all the barnacles and leeches and hangers-on who participate for advantage will drop away and the Church will consist of only sincere believers. Surely not a bad thing. As a secularist and a skeptic I am personally interested to see if Christianity can compete on a level playing field.
I honestly don’t know why the term ‘Freethinker’ went out of vogue. Atheist is too negative (and often attracts personalities to match), and I doubt most people will ever describe themselves as such. Absolute freedom of conscience should be something all belief systems cherish, but human nature seems to dictate that those who believe in something that has no logical basis are insecure about it, and therefore yearn for everyone to agree with them. Atheists are, if anything, worse than your average religious person in this regard, but for the moment their low numbers don’t put them in a position to be as bloodyminded as the worst theists. (No necessarily the case when they do become the majority, or a ruling minority).
I would tell my atheist friends not to worry either, but the only friend I have who identifies himself that way is not what you’d call a worrier, and I wouldn’t want to offend him. 😉
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert